Is there a risk in giving away your best work for free? Of course. Giving away awesome work for free has been my gateway drug to so many great opportunities. But best work needs to be defined for the category you're in. I'm blown away by the amount of people who don't realize that their best advice is exactly what you should give away for free. But if you're a painter, and your best work is the most amazing painting you ever made, and you give it away for free, that's maybe a different game. But maybe you strategically gave it away. Like to an important museum, maybe. Or to a billionaire that puts in a prime spot in that home, could that then become the gateway to more?

The problem with this debate is that when you are doing something for free, it needs to be strategic. Because what you are looking to do by giving away something for free is create leverage to then do something that is not for free, right? Right. DRock could have made that first video for someone who is not me, and it might not have panned out the same. He might not have received that ROI that he got for doing a video for free for me.

I think that people look at this too much as a blanket statement. For me, everything I give away for free has strategic purpose. I understand WHY I'm doing it, and that's why it becomes so much easier to do, even though I don't always expect an outcome from that action. That becomes the big part of this. Way too many people do stuff for free and that expect this windfall behind it. Then when it's not delivered, they become disappointed; and in that disappointment, they don't follow up, they don't try it again. They don't repeat that action over and over, which actually has more upside than anything else. Three out of five times it will bring you some kind of value. Don't focus on the two out of five.